Inbox Health, a billing platform, has launched an artificial intelligence assistant to help answer patient questions.
The HIPAA-compliant AI, which has already been in a pilot phase, can cut response and research time to seconds and is fluent in 60 languages across phone, text, email and live chat, the company said. It can also escalate a question to a human agent as needed. The tool will be rolled out initially to existing customers over the next few weeks.
Inbox supports more than 3,500 practices nationwide with automating patient billing and payments. The AI agent integrates into its billing platform and with practice management systems. As a result, it can also handle back-office tasks like updating addresses, collecting insurance info, issuing paper statements and more. Built on an OpenAI large language model, it was fine-tuned based on millions of past Inbox interactions.
“The launch today is really the culmination of the efforts that have been underway behind the scenes for the last year,” Inbox co-founder and CEO Blake Walker told Fierce Healthcare.
Users can customize prompts, tone and escalation thresholds to match their unique needs. They also get access to every AI-generated transcript within the company’s platform. So far, the tool has been able to resolve more than 70% of patient questions without call center intervention. Most questions are related to insurance or billing, while some are also related to financial support, per initial Inbox data.
Fourteen million Americans owe medical debt over $1,000, and personal healthcare spending is also on the rise. Four in 10 patients are confused by their medical bills, a 2022 YouGov survey found. Separately, Inbox found in a survey of practices that more than half had a patient leave their practice over a perceived billing issue.
If patient questions don’t get answered, bills are unlikely to get paid, Walker noted. “If they’re asking questions and you’re not answering them quickly, or at all, you’re going to have bad results,” he said. An AI agent is more cost-effective, more patient and more detail-oriented than a human, he added. “We think everyone should be using this.”
Walker expects Inbox’s AI agent to get better over time. Inbox is aggressively investing into R&D for AI, he added. “We think there’s a lot of interaction points with our product, within the EHR, that we can add,” he said.